Computers, cellular phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other electronic devices may controllably lose power. For example, a battery power supply may slowly discharge to a level forcing a device to shut down. Non-volatile memory located in such devices may implement background operations, which are initiated and executed without awareness of a controller. An example of a background operation is a memory array refresh during which content of the memory array is periodically rewritten to recover from cell level drift due to voltage or temperature stress. Another example is the implementation of an embedded wear-leveling algorithm.
A prior approach for a power loss in an electronic device results in a power supply removal that interrupts and compromises the completion of the background task. Upon a subsequent restoration of power, the interruption of the background operation may result in data integrity issues or reliability issues.